Mr. Purple

If you’ve ever longed to follow your Katz’s pastrami-on-rye experience with an Elyx spritz, served poolside and al fresco, you’re in luck. Mr. Purple, a rooftop bar fifteen stories above Ludlow and Orchard Streets, atop the Hotel Indigo, opened in November, amid controversy. Aiming for a kind of neighborliness, the proprietors named the bar after the eccentric L.E.S. icon Adam Purple, a community-garden activist with a dark past, offending locals and relatives alike. The luxury-on-Ludlow vibe is equally uneasy. The interior, meant to evoke an artist’s loft, leads to two outdoor patios, with chaise longues, purple chairs, staggeringly gorgeous views, and a swimming pool. “This is horrible!” a neighborhood man said on a recent night, scowling. “It’s like a disco bar in Thailand in 1995.” Other patrons, shouting over the din of Calvin Harris, Shaggy, and “Hollaback Girl,” seemed to disagree. Amid muscled security guards wearing earpieces and waitresses in minidresses and ankle boots, tourists and locals both looked perfectly content. A group of women spoke Mandarin on a couch; French men in thin European pants took pictures of the tiny, glowing pool, their scarves fluttering in the breeze; a young man told a young woman, proudly, “Sometimes this is my workspace.” And how are the drinks? In an age of near-universal craft-cocktail excellence, they are mediocre, pricey, and boldly unsubtle, served in acrylic. The namesake drink is powerfully sweet, and includes tequila, allspice dram, and floating cranberries; the Rooftop Lemonade tastes like Capri Sun doctored by a flask. If you go, raise a glass of decent whiskey to another local icon: the Luna Lounge, the shabby and wonderful bar, formerly at this location, that doesn’t live here anymore. ♦